I take distinct pleasure in announcing the inauguration of a much-revised and richer website for the Keats-Shelley Association of America (http://k-saa.org), a site that will lead not just to current information on events relevant to the younger Romantics, but also to programs on an international stage, including the almost weekly series of lectures and readings held by the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome and the upcoming first-ever conference on Keats to be held at the Hampstead house where he wrote so much of his major poetry, which will take place the first weekend of May 2014. We anticipate keeping the website current in terms of such activities, but also as a means of providing quick access to scholarly resources on the internet germane to our interests. We have also instituted a PayPal account accessible from the site, allowing you to join the K-SAA or effortlessly to renew your membership there.

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It has been twenty years since the publication of Anne K. Mellor’s foundational study Romanticism and Gender (1993). Those twenty years have witnessed a wellspring of scholarship about Romantic-era women writers and a series of excellent critical biographies and anthologies. Nevertheless, much work remains to be done, both in terms of recovering forgotten women writers of the period and in more clearly contextualizing writers who have already been “recovered.” This special issue invites articles that provide new insight into the lives, writings, and cultural contexts of Romantic-era women. We seek to reconsider how we frame women’s lives and writings: what elements of their experiences do we privilege, and what do we ignore? Perhaps more important, what criteria do we employ when we make these determinations? Topics may include (but are not limited to): women and political writing, gender and genre, women and religion, gender and authorial identity, epistolary culture, literary mentorship, re-thinking periodization (Romantic v. Victorian), and re-assessing the canon.

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The Shelley-Godwin Archive, launched on October 31, is now live. The new digital resource comprises the manuscripts of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. For the first time ever, the widely scattered manuscripts of England’s “first family of writers” are being brought together in digital form online for worldwide use. Visit the site at www.shelleygodwinarchive.org.

Created in partnership with the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford and the MITH at the University of Maryland, the Shelley-Godwin Archive makes manuscripts and early editions of works by these four key writers of British Romantic literature freely available to the public online. They will enable scholars to study, annotate, and manipulate manuscripts in ways that they could never do with paper or single images. Bringing all four writers together, it will allow scholars to unite the critical, historical, and biographical strands of their research. Most of the primary material in the Shelley-Godwin Archive is drawn from The NYPL’s Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle and the Bodleian's Shelley holdings, the two foremost collections of these materials in the world.

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We invite proposals for an international Romanticism conference, to be
held at the University of Tokyo on June 13–15, 2014. This event will
bring together four scholarly societies from three continents: it is a
supernumerary conference of the North American Society for the Study
of Romanticism (NASSR), also supported by the British Association for
Romantic Studies (BARS), the German Society for English Romanticism
(GER), and the Japan Association of English Romanticism (JAER).

Over the last two decades, there has been sustained scholarly interest
in the connections between European Romanticism and the peoples,
cultures, and literatures of the rest of the world. While our approach
will be informed by the legacy of Saidian “Orientalism,” we are
particularly interested in models of intercultural connection which
refine or challenge totalizing models of domination and subordination.
We welcome papers that shed light upon the question of “connection”
from the broadest range of perspectives: imaginative, linguistic,
material, social, sexual, scientific, economic, and political.

Drawing on our location in Tokyo, we will use this conference to
consider the broader task of forging connections between Eastern and
Western literature and scholarship. In a Japanese context, the idea of
interpersonal “connection” (kizuna) takes on a different resonance,
because of its close connection to the project of recovery (saisei)
following the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami. This
conference wishes to explore how such acts of cross-cultural
translation offer the possibility of reciprocal transformations of
meaning.

We welcome explorations of the reception of European Romanticism in
Asia and other regions of the world, as well as discussions of the
future status of Romanticism studies in a geographically diverse and
technologically connected scholarly world.

In addition, the site offers information about the Friends, their semi-annual publication The Coleridge Bulletin, and their other Coleridge-oriented programs of interest to both scholars and enthusiasts.

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Folks at Vancouver Island University have created a video detailing their interpretation of William Blake's Printing process. Thanks to Roger Whitson on the NASSR Listserv for alerting us to this video.

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Romantic Circles is delighted to announce the publication of Romantic Numbers, edited by Maureen N. McLane, a new volume in our Praxis series.

With essays by Matthew F. Wickman, Marjorie Levinson, James Brooke-Smith, John Savarese, Bo Earle, Ron Broglio, and two afterwords by Maureen N. McLane, this volume explores older and newer logics of “matching” and “counting” and “measuring” (whether statistical, geometric, or otherwise un/calculable), and it registers an upsurge of interest in formal-language, neurocognitive, and medial-historical approaches.

The six essays of Romantic Numbers invite us to think “bodies,” “multitudes,” and “subjectivity” along different axes. They ask us to think about the (romantic) one, the (romantic) proper name, quantity, and quality; they invite us to reflect on the status of poetry and measure, about the work of the novel as totalization, about models of mind, about calculuses of populations and food. Ranging through Wordsworth, Scott, Malthus, Babbage, and Galt (among others), this volume points to new directions in romanticist thinking while reconstructing the complexity of romantic-period thought.

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The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of electronic editions of America a Prophecy copies B and I. Ten of the fourteen extant copies of America were printed in 1793, the date on its title plate. Copy I, now in the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, is from this printing. The eighteen plates of copy I, like those of the other 1793 copies but unlike those of the later copies, were printed on two sides of the leaves, except for the frontispiece and title page (plates 1 and 2), and left uncolored. The plates were printed in greenish-black ink; five lines at the end of the text on plate 4 were masked and did not print, and plate 13 is in its first state. Copy B was printed in 1795 with copy A in the same brownish black ink on one side of the paper, with plate 13 in its second state. Unlike copy A, however, it is uncolored except for gray wash on the title plate. Now in the Morgan Library and Museum, copy B has a very curious history. Its plates 4 and 9, which were long assumed to be original, are in fact lithographic facsimiles from the mid 1870s produced to complete the copy. For a full technical description and history of this copy, see Joseph Viscomi, “Two Fake Blakes Revisited; One Dew-Smith Revealed.” Blake in Our Time: Essays in Honour of G. E. Bentley, Jr. Ed. Karen Mulhallen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. 35-78. Copies B and I join six other copies in the Archive, copies E and F (1793), A (1795), M (c. 1807), and O (1821), which altogether represent the full printing history of this illuminated book.

America a Prophecy was the first of Blake's "Continental Prophecies," followed by Europe a Prophecy in 1794, executed in the same style and size but usually colored, and, in 1795, "Africa" and "Asia," two sections making up The Song of Los. Fine and important examples of all three books are in the Archive. Like all the illuminated books in the Archive, the text and images of America copies B and I are fully searchable and are supported by the Archive's Compare feature. New protocols for transcription, which produce improved accuracy and fuller documentation in editors' notes, have been applied to copies B and I and to all the America texts previously published.

With the publication of these two copies, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 85 copies of Blake's nineteen illuminated books in the context of full bibliographic information about each work, careful diplomatic transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies. In addition to illuminated books, the Archive contains many important manuscripts and series of engravings, color printed drawings, tempera paintings, and water color drawings.

Due to recent security concerns related to Java browser plugins, the Archive has disabled its Java-based ImageSizer and Virtual Lightbox applications. Users can still view 100 and 300 dpi JPEG images as well as complete transcriptions for all works in the Archive including America copies B and I. Text searching is also still available for all works in the Archive, and image searching remains available for all works except those in preview mode. In the coming months the Archive will implement redesigned pages that restore the features of ImageSizer and the Virtual Lightbox without the use of Java.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.